A Normil Day

Rick Normil

There's an art to dealing with nth dimensional imps, you see. They're vastly more powerful than any human, even Extraordinaries, and they don't have normal human motivations. But that doesn't mean they're undefeatable. Not having normal human motivations isn't the same as having completely incomprehensible ones. Once you work out what a trickster is after, you've got a handle on him.

Like I said before, that one was trying to get a reaction out of me. So I didn't give him one.

Half an hour later, holding the remains of my BreadCo espresso, I got off the Green Line just a block from the Daily Torch building. The Daily Torch is a giant screaming cosmic cat toy, and I've never figured out if my own weirdness magnet tendencies are a side effect of working there or the other way around. I hoped that when Floating Hat Guy said he was going to challenge someone more advanced, he would skip a couple of hundred years and mess with future scientists and their Annoyance Capture Rays—or, alternatively, that he was currently driving himself to screaming frustration trying to get a rise out of the giant tortoises at the Marina City Zoo. But if he hadn't, he would turn up here, at the Torch. And he would turn the big bronze torch sculpture on the roof into an ice cream cone, because every supervillain ever gotta mess with that thing.

Seriously. There's a citizen's group suing the Torch for maintaining an attractive nuisance. The argument, as I understand it, is roughly, every superstrong poser has ripped that thing off its base and tried to hit people with it, why the hell you gotta keep it around. The Torch's lawyers countered with, we can't be held responsible for what depraved individuals do, it's a historical landmark of great significance that has been there (intermittently) since the nineteen twenties, and besides, it's ours and you can't touch it. Not being a lawyer nor particularly interested, I hadn't been paying too much attention to the specifics.

I walked in, said hello to Helen the receptionist, and took the elevator up to the newsroom.

And didn't even get to set foot in it. As the elevator doors opened, Jenna Germaine strode in and said, "Get your camera and come on, we've got an incident."

Ah, life as Normil. Why yes, I have heard that joke a few times, why do you ask?

~~~~~~~~

So. Jenna Germaine.

If you picture a white businesswoman, slim and smallish, with dark brown hair worn a bit past shoulder-length, you've got the right general idea. She's pretty. She usually dresses in bright colors, even pastels; turquoise is a favorite. You might look at her and think she's harmless.

Excuse me a minute while I laugh at you for that.

Jenna is, among other things, a story-obsessed lunatic. And if you think that's more likely to get her hurt than anything else—well, it's true that she gets into trouble the way I get into weirdness. But she's also still here.

It's not all connections in high places, either. Although I wouldn't underestimate those.

I'm her favorite photographer, largely because I take the pictures rather than standing there gawping and wondering if it's really, truly a tyrannosaur, which, yes, has happened to us. Today was a little more mundane, for a certain Normil value of mundane. Adam Stitch was throwing a tizzy fit.

Adam Stitch—where to start?

Well, he was probably created by a shadowy person who calls himself the Superior. Hard to say for the same reason it's hard to say anything definite about the Superior's doings: he's never been caught. Stitch was put together from corpses, probably using parts from at least ten people, and it shows. He's a nasty grey putty color, or most of him is; his left hand and forearm look like they came from a black guy. He's a bit over seven feet tall and four feet across at the shoulder. His face is lopsided to the point of grotesquerie, and he's got a spiked ball in place of a right hand. It's on a chain that he can reel in or let out, so he can use it either as an unusually nasty fist or a sort of morningstar. He's strong, to the point where he gives Guardian a run for his money.

Which only makes sense, because he was created to kill Guardian.

I climbed up on a car to take pictures. Half a football field away, Stitch tried to pick up a car and hurl it, only to be foiled by good old down-home physics; the bumper came off in his hand. He howled in rage, spiked the bumper through a plate-glass window, kicked the car onto its side, and sent it spinning down the street with another hard kick. It came to rest near the police cordon.

Jenna had her back to the car and was fiddling with her tape recorder. "Poor zombie," she said. "They shouldn't keep him in the Tank."

Yeah, that's the other thing about Stitch; he's mentally disabled, and may not understand that his rampages hurt people. It's possible that the Superior made him like that on purpose. Poor bastard's as much a victim as anything else. Which doesn't matter one little bit to anyone he throws a car at, of course. "The Tank's the only place that can hold him," I said.

"And look what a wonderful job it's doing!" When Jenna decides to lay on the sarcasm, she does it nice and thick. "I'm serious. The Tank is full of smarter criminals and all of them know what sets him off. Someone like Ticktock might do it just to watch the fireworks."

Don't listen to what the internet tells you about the top ten scariest supervillains. Ticktock is nothing but a strangetech, and not the wildest strangetech out there, but he's so much more frightening than your straightforward money-and-power type. We're talking about a man who looks at a department store mannequin and thinks, know what this needs? More razorblades. He likes to take innocuous things, bits of life that you see every day, and "upgrade" them until they have drill bits and acid and a hankering to kill your face. He's not just off his rocker, he set fire to it. The good news is that he can't get living thugs anymore; nobody likes to think about what he did to them when he got bored. And if you ask me, the crazy ones—people like Ticktock or Mister Trick—are a hundred times worse than a guy who can psychokinetic you into the upper atmosphere.

Well, with the exception of Sigil. But Sigil's the exception to everything.

"Or," Jenna said, and I could hear an idea forming, "as a distraction—Rick, you have your thing."

No, no, no. I did not need to use the thing. Especially since we didn't need Guardian showing up and Stitch really getting his angry on. At the moment, he was just chucking fire hydrants at thirtieth story windows. (Water went everywhere. The SPEAR team—Specialist Police Extraordinary Aggression Response, in case you've been living on Saturn—ignored it grimly and continued setting up some sort of bazooka-rocket-launcher deal.) "I have it," I said reluctantly. "But—"

Adam looked up at the sky. "W-W-WHERE IS GUARDIAN?!" It was loud enough to make panes of glass shiver. "COME D-D-DOWN AND FIGHT!"

"Hey." It was a policeman. I looked at him and took another snap with my camera poised exactly where it had been; sloppy work, maybe, but a smart man doesn't annoy a cop. "Hey, buddy. You gotta get off there, we're expanding the perimeter."

In case whatever the SPEARs were going to shoot at Stitch didn't work, I decoded. "Right," I said, and scrambled down.

Stitch screamed, "C-COWARD!!"

And then he jumped, about a quarter block, almost to where the SPEARs were. The woman who had been loading the launcher swung it around and triggered it from point-blank range. The thing that hit Stitch—whatever it was—didn't explode. It clamped on instead, looking faintly like a metal spider.

It electrocuted him. He screamed.

And then I felt like someone had body-slammed my brain, and everything went red and black.

__________________________________________________________

Author's Note: And now, we start to get into the meat of the story.  Incidentally, I've decided to change the genre to Adventure.  I thought of doing Action, but I think it may start too slow for that.  Let me know what you think in the comments, and remember to vote if you enjoyed it!